Empty Promises

back to Bettina. He hit them both when they got out of line. He was short, but he prided himself on his muscles and he honed them at health clubs so that his biceps bulged. He often appeared in police reports because he got into fights at parties with other men. He seemed unable to go more than five or six months without exploding in one way or another.
    Bettina went back to Steve; she couldn’t resist him when he was sweet. It appeared to the Lynnwood police who responded to a call for help on March 6, 1986, that Sherer intended to own both Bettina and Jami. Bettina told them she wondered why Jami stayed with Steve, and yet she couldn’t see that her own situation was a mirror image of Jami’s.
    “Jami was always crying that spring,” Bettina remembered, adding that Jami was fiercely loyal to Steve even though she knew he was really with Bettina. Apparently he had told Jami that it was Bettina who caused all the problems. Maybe Jami thought that she could make Steve happy. Let her try , Bettina thought wearily.
    On that rainy night of March 6, Steve showed up at the apartment he shared with Bettina in Alderwood in the wee hours of the morning, only to find her packing her bags to leave him again. She couldn’t share him any longer, she said, and she was sick of having him gone all night, even when she knew he wasn’t with Jami. Despite his growing interest in Jami, Steve wouldn’t allow Bettina to walk away from him—not until he said it was over.
    It was a terrible time for both young women. “There were a lot of bad memories,” Bettina said, trying to sort out one single incident from a string of abuse.
    But this was the night when she finally decided to leave. Steve didn’t come home. Bettina was worried about how she would get to work by seven the next morning. “I had no ride and Steve had the car,” she recalled. “He’d been out all night long. He kept calling and saying he was on his way home, but he never got there. When he finally walked in, I picked up my bags to leave.”
    She told the officers who responded to her 911 call that she was almost at the door when something slammed into the back of her head. Blood streamed down her neck from a deep gash in her scalp. Steve had thrown a heavy shot glass at her, and it had shattered on impact. She was lucky to have only a concussion.
    Bettina was taken to the ER to have her wound stitched up, and then police accompanied her back to her apartment to ensure her safety. That was a prudent decision; when they searched the premises, they found Steve Sherer hiding under a blanket in the bedroom closet. When he was arrested and led past Bettina, he turned to her, shouting, “Fuck off! I’m going to kill that bitch!”
    The officers noted his remark in the police report; it would come back to haunt him.
    This time, Steve was convicted—but only of second-degree assault. He filed his own complaint, accusing the arresting officers of using excessive force. His charges were judged to be unfounded.
    Within two days, Steve transferred his affections to Jami Hagel. Although there were a few more legal skirmishes, Bettina had finally succeeded in extricating herself from a punishing alliance. She would, however, never completely get over her fear of Steve Sherer. More than a decade later, she was still afraid of him.

2
    B ettina Rauschberg was only one woman among more than a million in 1986 who had suffered injuries in what the U.S. Justice Department calls intimate partner abuse. Most of the physical attacks were, like hers, deemed simple assaults. Ten years earlier, 1,600 women and slightly fewer men had died in domestic disputes; ten years later, 1,320 women and 510 men were killed by “intimate partners.” Through sheer luck or a final desperate decision to run, Bettina got away. Experts on domestic violence have a rule of thumb; it takes seven beatings before a woman or a man will find the strength and the courage to leave.
    Some don’t make it that far.
    The man Bettina escaped from was the same man that Jami Hagel took home to meet her family. Steve had a way with women, a power that only those who fell in love with him could explain—if even they could put it into words. He wasn’t that good-looking, he wasn’t that affluent unless his mother helped him out, and he had demonstrated an explosive temper. Still, he never lacked for female company.
    From the beginning, Jami Hagel was mesmerized by Steve, and her parents and brothers carefully